Or maybe it will be completely credible.
Wikipedia is like "the information age" meets "The Satanic Verses". In the Salman Rushdie book, "satanic verses" were extra verses that were maliciously added to the existing text of the Koran over the course of hundreds of years by people who translated/copied it by hand.
With Wikipedia anybody can twist, distort, embellish and/or completely fabricate whatever they wish. And once made, that entry will, in some form or another, bounce around cyberspace forever. "History" in the "information age" is becoming more and more meaningless.
I don't know if, a hundred years from now, "history" will have any credibility at all.
Or maybe it will be completely credible.
I don't know if, a hundred years from now, "history" will have any credibility at all.
Nonsense. Whatever credibility history ever had it retains. You think biased data somehow got edited out of the process in 4th cent BC Athens, or 10th cent AD Constantinople, or 19th cent Paris? A hundred years from now it will be MUCH EASIER to write the history of our era than ever before. Why? It's all being preserved.
The historian has always had to cope with multiple sources of info with multiple biases. In fact, that is a historian's dream! The only bad thing for history is when the data is DESTROYED.
It really is only the liberal mind that frets that people can't sort out data on their own. An "editor" is nothing more than a middleman, like an insurance agent or a stock broker. A middleman is only needed because of a technological deficiency, and the middleman always goes away when the technology arrives to eliminate the gap between the consumer of the data and the producer. The "editor" does not help the historian. The "editor" just lays one more layer of bias on top of primary sources.
Absolutely nothing has changed in the information age except the volume of the info being produced, and its endurability. The digital revolution will produce much more accurate history, just like, in the long run, the blogosphere will purify, not foul, the information available to the public. The only difference between the old editorial process and the new is that the new takes place in public.
Let not your heart be troubled.